A New Whitney Exhibition Examines the Proto-Queer World of Early Modernist Ballet

When the elevator doors slide open onto the Whitney Museum’s eighth-floor gallery, home to Nick Mauss’s new solo exhibition, “Transmissions,” a collection of George Platt Lynes’s photographs suspended against a white scrim sets the tone: at once refrigerator-cool with black-and-white classicism and 98.6-degrees-hot with erotic charge. The handful of dance-related portraits—ballerina Diana Adams in a calf-grazing tutu; Maria Tallchief with outstretched legs at a right angle—nod to Platt Lynes’s longstanding liaison with New York City Ballet. In the others, drawn from the studio photographer’s private work, a nude man dangles by his rope-tied ankles; another lies back languidly, draped in translucent plastic sheeting. A third kneels in a Surrealist composition, a cut-out eye over his heart and a smile across (most of) his lap.

Encountering the body—by turns passive and active, stylized and sexualized—makes a compelling introduction to Mauss’s reexamination of early modernist ballet as it unfolded in New York between the 1930s and ’50s. Then, dance occupied a central role in avant-garde circles. The Russian émigré, George Balanchine, was shaping a wholly new, wholly American take on choreography, with the polymath impresario Lincoln Kirstein at this side; painters such as Dorothea Tanning, Paul Cadmus, and Pavel Tchelitchew, along with composers Igor Stravinsky and Virgil Thompson, took part in the spectacles. “One of the big surprises for me early on was that this is not just a matter of artists making costumes and sets for ballet, but it was very much an ongoing, reciprocal dialogue,” Mauss says of a cross-pollination that blurred into collaborations, kinships, even dalliances. “It’s not fluidity, exactly,” he continues, shying away from the contemporary term, “but it’s a very intense kind of participation in multiple and often disconnected worlds.”

Nick Mauss, Re-creation of the costume Paul Cadmus designed for Filling Station, 2018

The same could be said for the jewel box exhibition, which incorporates swathes of media—projection, video, live performance, costume, stage design, sculpture, and photographs—with gossamer finesse. On the far end of the gallery, backlit by a river-view window, is a sheer work suit with red trim and a cartoonish red heart. It’s a re-creation by Mauss of the costume for the 1937 ballet Filling Station, choreographed by Lew Christensen; Cadmus, then steeped in notoriety following his louche sailor painting The Fleet’s In!, was invited to bring a subliminal undercurrent to the costume design. (Elsewhere in the gallery, a Platt Lynes photo shows the dancer Jacques D’Amboise posed in the jumper; not included is the version of a model wearing it sans briefs.)

The element of transparency carries over to the scrim, which separates the first part of the exhibition from the stage. Each afternoon (plus Friday evenings) a rotating quartet of dancers turns up for a four-hour performance, spanning barre exercises to cooldown. In between, a choreographic section created with the 16 dancers draws on vintage poses seen in photographs and on film, with shades of the group’s disparate backgrounds. There’s a Merce Cunningham alum (Brandon Collwes), a former ballerina from Dance Theatre of Harlem (Alexandra Jacob), and several who have worked with dance/art-world crossovers Sarah Michelson and Ryan McNamara.

That’s where Mauss, something of a polymath impresario himself, as a scholar, curator, and artist, has staked out territory in recent years. In 2014, he staged a five-day “disarticulated ballet” at Frieze London, casting dancers alongside performers like Kim Gordon and Juliana Huxtable. He then teamed up on an exhibition in Monaco celebrating the artist, textile designer, and Ballets Russes scenographer Leon Bakst. There, the challenge was “how to contextualize even something as fabulous as Nijinksy’s tights from La Spectre de la Rose. If you just see them in a heap, they don’t communicate anything,” Mauss says with a laugh. (Serge Diaghilev, the troupe’s mastermind, makes a cameo in “Transmissions” via his calling card—a talisman that Kirstein displayed in his living room.)

A larger-than-life projection of 850 color slides further animates the space, part of an enormous body of photographs taken by the dance critic Carl Van Vechten from the late ’30s to the ’60s. “He would hold these photographic séances in what looks like a very small room in his apartment, with these amazing colored fabrics and boldly printed backdrops,” says Mauss, describing a cache that includes fictional spoofs, star turns by Alicia Markova, and a spotlight on the shorts worn in the Ballets Russes’s Le Train Bleu. “As the slides were going by, one of the dancers recognized Carmen de Lavallade, and she said, ‘Oh my goodness, I just did a workshop with her—she’s so incredible,’ ” Mauss recalls of that hyperlink-style connection. “As much as it’s a kind of historical exhibition, it’s not a straightlaced historical exhibition. It’s meant to be about our moment.”

“One thing I hope,” he continues, “is that people would come into the exhibition and say, ‘This is not ballet’—that it would actually undo a lot of assumptions.” The reputation for being stiff, humorless? Not this crowd, with Dorothea Tanning’s renderings of her whimsical animal-head costumes for The Night Shadow, or the tassel-stockinged dancer in Van Vechten photos, or the free-spirited Fire Island photo sessions with Margaret French, Cadmus, and José Martinez. (In a sign of complicated times, Kirstein married Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma, and kept Martinez as a lover.)

“I do think it’s a lot of layers to take in,” admits Mauss of the show’s interwoven threads. His own 9-foot-tall verre églomisé panels offer up more points of reflection—including of a video monitor playing Balanchine rehearsal footage, after an anecdote about how ballerinas often learn choreography by watching a tape through the mirror. Unlike the Ballets Russes works, largely lost to time because Diaghilev refused to record them, the Balanchine canon lives on some 50 blocks north of the Whitney, where the School of American Ballet grooms students to fill the company members’ shoes. Still, when Vogue first announced the academy in 1934, the future was uncertain: “The directors of this young school are deeply worried. Their funds will carry them only a few months longer. Then what?” Balanchine himself stated that Platt Lynes’s “pictures will contain, as far as I am concerned, all that will be remembered of my own repertory in a hundred years.” Time will tell.

“Transmissions,” Nick Mauss’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., runs through May 14 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with daily performances 12:00–4:00 p.m., plus 6:00–10:00 p.m. on Fridays; whitney.org.